I have met a woman on the Surrogacy Australia forum who has offered to surrogate for us. She lives in Albury which is a bit on the inconvenient side, but when you are planning on entering into something like this, do you really get to be choosy about where your wonderful helping angel comes from? I think not. Luckily, I am going to be down in Canberra in mid-August so I am hoping to take a day trip out to meet her.
She has five children and loves being pregnant and loves newborns, which is lovely because she understands how important babies and children are in people’s lives. Unfortunately she has what sounds like a slightly deranged ex-husband who was ‘abusive to her and her kids’… which is a huge worry. What if her being pregnant with our child sent him into a tail spin and put her and her children (and our potential child too!) at risk of his habitually violent ways?! When I asked her about this, she quite dismissed it and said it was none of his business.
It is a bit of a conundrum from where we stand… obviously we desperately want a surrogate to help us in this enormous endeavour, but at the same time we really need that to be the right person – someone who will happily give the baby back to us, the biological parents and stick by the surrogacy agreement should we be fortunate enough to have a positive outcome at the end of the process. We definitely do not need complications like an interfering or violent ex-partner. What to do? What to do? I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth and say ‘no’, when there is no guarantee that any future offer may come our way. 🙁
Update 10th August:
Well, the more I got to know this lady, the more concerned I became. Her husband had sexually abused her and her two eldest daughters before she finally managed to kick him out, and was known to local police for being of violent temperament. Yet she had no restraining order in place to provide her and her family some protection. This to me indicated that she was not someone who was unlikely to act with good judgement. In itself, this is bad enough, but we got to talking and she told me she collected ‘baby dolls’, on enquiry, it turns out that after a miscarriage a number of years earlier, she had bought herself an expensive ‘Reborn Doll’, which, it turns out, is a freakishly realistic (but not really) newborn sized and weighted doll. And now she has collected four in total. O.o
Sigh… I am sure she is trying her best to work through her own really crappy circumstances, but I am convinced she is not a good candidate for surrogacy. The doll collecting thing is just a bit too creepy for my liking… and kinda suggests she would have real trouble handing over a baby that she had been nurturing for nine months. 🙁